Reading in a foreign language is hard work requiring teacher support to ensure learner understanding and develop learners’ reading skills.
The following guidelines may be useful when planning how to develop learners' reading ability particularly at an early age.
Do not place too many reading demands on learners – too many demands can lead to lack of confidence and fear of failure.
Give the learners confidence. Learners should be told that they cannot always be expected to understand every word. The use of "support materials" (e.g. pictures, drawings and charts) will help them feel confident and show them what it is important to concentrate on.
Help learners to develop strategies for reading. Some of the most important reading strategies include:
- Recognizing sound/letter correspondences.
- Predicting - it is useful to encourage learners to predict what they think might come next in a text. This means that they can then read on to check whether their expectation is true or not.
- Working out the meaning from context. Although the teacher might like to teach "words" before the learners read something, he/she also needs to encourage them to use pictures and their general knowledge about a topic to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words.
- Recognizing discourse patterns and markers. Words such as "and", "then", "but" give important signals about what is coming next in a text. This is especially important when reading a story or a set of instructions.
- Build in variety – not just in terms of content but text length and complexity as well as response – it’s not always necessary to answer questions as sometimes we can just discuss what we have read or even draw or perform it.
Above all, try to make reading engaging so that leaners foster a love of language and with that love, make real progress in their language learning.
